Take 2. FRIDAY'S GUIDE TO MOVIES & MUSIC. Friday's High School Movie Panel.

Even Arnold Can't Rescue This

July 02, 1993|By James Renwick, Glenbard North.

It's amazing how seven screenwriters can butcher a great idea. Zak Penn and Adam Leff were lowly script readers until they cooked up a great idea for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

What if the typical Arnold character, complete with bad one-liners and lots of hard rock music, was suddenly thrown into the real world?

What if the typical bad guy, satanic with some identifiable disfigurement, was also catapulted into present day New York? It's brilliant. It allows Arnold to parody himself.

But instead Shane Black ("Lethal Weapon") and David Arnott, along with the two original creators, and a few others have, at Schwarzenegger's instruction, turned a cutting and original idea into a festival of boring politically correctness.

The story of Danny (Austin O'Brien) is simple. He loves the movie character Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger) and with the help of a magic movie ticket he is thrown into Slater's movie world. When bad guy Benedict (Charles Dance, who wrote all his own dialogue and the only good lines) gets hold of the ticket, he finds that he can jump to our world, and in a moment worthy of an American Express commercial he states, "In this world, the bad guys can win!"

But once Ah-nold gets into the real world, "Last Action Hero" goes from action thriller to public service announcement. The film drills us with the oh-so-revolutionary idea that our world is way too violent, and that we shouldn't imitate our on-screen heroes because, after all, the movies aren't like real life.

Even the interesting ideas, like Benedict using the ticket to bring all sorts of evil characters out of the movies, are ruined. Schwarzenegger built things up, only to have them crumble around his feet.

It seems the latest trend for Hollywood's most bankable stars is to suddenly reject everything that's made them bankable. Eddie Murphy stopped cussing and went PC in "Boomerang" and "The Distinguished Gentleman," both of which were flops. Sylvester Stallone decided that he was more than just an action star, so he tried comedy in "Oscar" and "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot." The eight people who saw both of those films quickly decided that Sly should stick to beating people up. So now it's Ah-nold's turn to shoot himself in the foot, and he does so quite effectively in "Last Action Hero." (STAR)(STAR)